Super 8 – 7.5

After wandering out of Bad Teacher, I dropped in to the adjoining theater to see why the local paper had given this movie four stars. Accordingly, I didn’t see the first twenty minutes, but I sort of think that any “explanation” I missed is beside the point. This was E.T. for the age of video games, and the action was there for action’s sake, not to develop a meaningful plot. What mattered, instead, were the people, specifically the five youngsters, who while making their own movie got caught up in the bigger movie around them – a Blow-Up hommage, literally. There was more honest chemistry between Joel Courtney and the spectacular Elle Fanning than you see between most grown-ups who are bedding each other, and the interplay among the boys was as good as Diner. Best was the completed home movie, shown alongside the credits, in which the same young actors who were convincingly realistic in the main movie were just as convincing as untutored seventh-graders. If every scene in the kids’ movie was a cinematic cliche, the same could be said for the entire film. But what fun!